How it works
How Obiter works
Obiter is a study platform for UK law students, built on a curated database of real cases, live legislation, and the practice tools you need to revise. Everything you study is verified material you can actually cite in an exam.
Built on real UK legal material
Obiter is a single workspace for everything a UK law student actually does: revising cases, looking up statutes, practising SBAQs and essays, tracking modules and deadlines. The point is to put the materials and the tools in one place so you can spend your time studying instead of switching between five tabs.
Obiter draws from a manually verified database of over 10,000 UK and EU law cases and legal concepts. Every entry carries the real citation, the facts, the ratio and a one-line holding, drawn from BAILII, the Supreme Court and publicly available law reports. Statutes are seeded live from legislation.gov.uk so the section you read on Obiter is the section currently in force, with amendments applied. All of these critical study resources are available in-app at the click of a button.
AI features sit on top of this database, not in front of it. When Obiter AI answers a question, when flashcards generate, when an essay prompt produces a model response, all of it draws only from the verified material below. The next section walks through how that works.
How Obiter stays grounded
Three layers between you and a wrong answer.
Verified case database
Obiter’s case library is built from authoritative UK sources: BAILII, official court judgments, and publicly available law reports. Every case entry carries the real citation, the facts, the ratio, and a one-line holding, so you’re working from the judgment itself and not a paraphrase of a paraphrase.
Rules out: Made-up case names, invented holdings, and the Rylands-v-Fletcher-meets-Caparo style hallucinations that generic AI produces.
Live legislation from legislation.gov.uk
UK statutes are pulled directly from legislation.gov.uk, the government’s authoritative source. When you look up a section of the Human Rights Act, you’re reading the real section (current wording, amendments applied), not a model’s guess at what it probably says.
Rules out: Outdated statutory language, repealed sections rendered as current, and hallucinated subsections.
AI grounded only in that database
Obiter AI is retrieval-augmented: before it answers anything, it pulls the relevant entries from the verified database and writes its response from those. If a case or statute isn’t in the database, Obiter AI tells you so instead of inventing one. Every answer shows its sources inline, so you can click through and check.
Rules out: Confident fabrications, unsourced claims, and the “I’m not sure but it’s probably…” failure mode.
What this means when you're revising
“What did Lord Atkin say in Donoghue v Stevenson?”
Generic chatbot
May paraphrase the neighbour principle, may invent a supporting quote.
Obiter AI
Pulls the real Donoghue entry, shows the ratio and the passage location, links to the judgment.
“Is section 3 of the Human Rights Act 1998 still in force?”
Generic chatbot
Confidently answers based on training-data vintage, may miss amendments.
Obiter AI
Returns the live text from legislation.gov.uk with the current in-force status.
“Give me a case where a contract was frustrated by government action.”
Generic chatbot
May invent a case name that sounds plausible.
Obiter AI
Returns real cases from the verified database, or tells you it can’t find one and asks you to narrow the facts.
Things we won't pretend are magic
Obiter's database is not the whole of English law. It covers the cases and statutes a UK law degree and the SQE actually touch, not every obscure 19th-century first-instance decision. If something's missing, the app tells you instead of making it up.
The AI is a study companion, not a legal adviser. It's there to help you learn, practise, and revise. It is not designed to advise on a live matter.
The database grows every week. If you hit a gap, send it to hello@obiter.site and we'll add it.
Study on verified ground.
Priority access when Obiter goes live in May 2026.